Thoughts From VMworld 2016, Part Two

Last week, we talked about Day 1 of VMworld and VMware’s focus on partners and its increased investment in the community. Today, I want to dive into my main takeaways from the remaining days of the event.

VMworld Day 2

VMware elaborated on Cloud Foundation for virtual compute, network, and storage systems. This will help IT deliver enterprise-ready cloud infrastructure for the private on-prem and public clouds. Cloud Foundation, which will be released in the coming months, is a VMware single pane of glass for managing those complexities that come along with multiple clouds. Cloud Foundation is being developed to work with all major cloud providers: Azure, AWS, Google, and VMware’s own vCloud Air, as well as in partnership with IBM.

VMware shared that some of the operational challenges organizations face with a multi-cloud environment will be around networking and security. Traditional networking practices continue to impact the agility and security of today’s networks along with complexities around migrating applications to the cloud. Cloud Foundation will help with these challenges since it has products like NSX running to flatten the network architecture across the multiple clouds, including on-prem. NSX will provide a more simplified way of connecting their environments along with security profiles and tighter security with micro-segmentation. It already has 1700 customers with 400% growth.

The Cloud Foundation from VMware aims to provide multi cloud management and be the SDDC platform to run clouds – including SLA/availability dashboard, policy-based placement and optimization, UI and API-driven cloud service broker, centralized multi-cloud cost accounting, and workload migration. The service is projected to include discovery and analytics, compliance and security, and deployment and migration tools. A prototype was demonstrated live in the session, but how this evolves will be an area to keep close tabs on.

VMware’s CEO, Pat Gelsinger, continued his discussion around the cloud and the industries that are moving to the cloud today. The top ten industries using cloud include construction, manufacturing, and banks, but technology vendors were #1 on the list. As a technology vendor, we are the ones leading our customers and companies to the cloud.

Some other announcements and case studies to be excited about, both from an admin and end-user perspective:

VMware vCloud Availability for vCloud Director is a brand new offering that will enable VMware vCloud Air Network partners, like Datapipe, to utilize cloud-based disaster recovery. The VCAN network is VMware’s ecosystem of certified providers that offer solutions for managing the complexity of IT operations and VMware technologies. The vCloud Availability service will support customers’ vSphere environments, and is a first step in this journey with big plans moving forward to enhance this initial version of the service.

Kit Colbert, VMware’s VP and GM of Cloud-Native Apps, spent some time talking about and demonstrating what the company is doing with containers. vSphere Integrated Containers, the new container registry and management console, now in beta, is meant to help vSphere admins work with containers in production.

The latest release of VMware Integrated OpenStack includes new features that simplify deployment and the use of existing vSphere workloads. Since OpenStack is notoriously difficult to deploy and manage, these enhancements should really improve the user experience.

vSAN, the hyper converged solution of VMware, has an announced 5,000 customers, and should serve as an enabler for private cloud and a storage solution for cross-cloud platform needs.

Mike Wittig, Director of Infrastructure Operations at Nike, discussed how implementing VMware’s VIO, NSX, and AirWatch took Nike to the next level in its digital platform strategy via automation. The company was able to use the service in both their retail stores and in tandem with mobile apps.

My time at VMworld 2016 provided a preview of what’s to come in the hybrid cloud world and a bevy of new services around that journey. Attending conferences like this is part of our commitment to stay abreast of latest technology innovations to help our clients – and loyal blog readers – leverage these new developments to solve specific issues and achieve their long term IT vision.

About David Lucky

As Datapipe’s Director of Product Management, David has unique insight into the latest product developments for private, public, and hybrid cloud platforms and a keen understanding of industry trends and their impact on business development. David writes about a wide variety of topics including security and compliance, AWS, Microsoft, and business strategy.

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